Laszlo G Fulop : The Fragrance of Hard Rolls
By Laszlo Fulop
In ’45 the Romanian administration released all Hungarian judges from the District Court. We already knew at the beginning of the summer that father would be a teacher at the Piarist High School with a salary of 4,000 leis per month, which was 4000 more than his settlement when he got laid off. This was at the time when one-liter milk cost 1,500 leis at the open-air market near the girls high school. Beside milk products, the market was not exactly endowed with goods: one could find only vegetables and fruit there, and those only toward the end of the summer. Flour or bread could not be seen anywhere. We hadn’t seen bread on our table for at least three months and vegetables or fruit only when they grew in our garden. We supplanted our morning milk with plum jam leftover from the canning of the previous fall. Now we became very aware how slowly fruit and vegetables grew.
So, the family ate, not of father’s salary, but of mother’s ingenuity. Shepherds from the mountains brought not only milk into the city, but also moonshine whiskey for sale. Mother bought a few liters of whiskey for some valuable family heirlooms and sold the whiskey by the bottle to Russian officers. She used the money so obtained for new and increased number of bottles. Unimaginable before, our mother became a wheeling-dealing merchant within a few weeks and her venture even showed some profit. Then came the great coup: she sold one of the moonshine shipments to her Russian clients not for money, but for flour. Mother used her limited vocabulary of Russian so well that even father, - whose adventures as prisoner-of-war after the First World War in Russia for five and a half years carried him across the length of that huge empire, and still spoke the language well – acknowledged her efforts with an appreciative smile. Mother planned to bake hard rolls from the flour and secured advance orders from local restaurants, which did not have bread or hard rolls any more than did the average households.
Preceding the first baking she kneaded the dough for hours late into the night and measured the amounts of dough into baskets in the warm kitchen so they’d rise by dawn. The kitchen got filled with the unusual, heady scent of the dough… We, children went to bed filled with anticipation. At five in the morning mother was already baking the rolls whose enticing fragrance spread beyond the kitchen, into the adjacent rooms and woke up even such sluggards as me. Didn’t quite understand, how one could get up and work after so little sleep, but we knew we were coming to experience an unusual day: a day of fresh hard rolls. By the time the rolls were baked we all stood in the door waiting for the time we could sink our teeth into the fist-size reddish-brown buns. The rolls were lined up in regular rows on clean white cloth on top of the table. Our mouth cavities got filled with saliva.
Mother began to divide the warm, fragrant hard rolls into groups, according to the orders she had to satisfy. She shuffled the rolls on the tabletop for quite a while counting the buns. Finally, her eyes filled with tears she announced to the spectators waiting in the door that none of us could eat out of this batch. All had been promised to the order-placing merchants and restaurants.
“But we eat first out of the next batch” she promised. “Tomorrow morning”. She added.
It hurt her a great deal more than us that she could not give fresh rolls to us, who’d not seen the like for months. However, we understood her commitment and accepted the decision easier than she thought. A day or two longer, it did not matter so much. Nevertheless, the length of the Lator Sandor Street seemed a great deal longer when I delivered the first batch of 120 rolls to the Sztrimbely Restaurant. I kept looking at the neatly arranged, checkered cloth hiding the rolls crouching underneath in the large, woven basket. Their fragrance encircled me even on the street. Scent seldom tempted me as much as that of these rolls.
“What would happen if I ate one? Only one. Would old man Sztrimbely count the rolls? And what if he counted only 119 instead of 120? He might think that he’d miscounted. But what if thinks the mother wanted to cheat him?”
I kept walking and the heady bouquet of fresh hard rolls kept taunting me all along the entire four blocks length of the lo-o-ong Lator Sandor Street.
(2004/LGF)
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